It is well known that the cost of products decreases over time. In most cases, the products are quickly replaced by new products. The new products are better and bump up the price long enough for the next product to come along. There are some things that are not replaced. Postal […]

As television broadcasters move to digital transmission systems, mandated by Congress through legislation signed into law on February 8, 2006 (known as the Digital Television Transition and Public Safety Act), frequency space that was previously used for television signals will be made available for other purposes. Analog broadcasters will have to stop transmitting their […]

In class we began talking about how Google ranked their pages, but did not get into the details of how any of this is performed underneath the surface.  I became interested in how this was actually carried through and I found some interesting finds.  According to Wikipedia’s (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank) article on PageRank, ranking pages is actually […]

The semantic web is the target of a great deal of skepticism, but some projects are starting to make use of its principles to some of the most valuable resources on the internet even more valuable.  DBpedia, a part of the LinkingOpenData project, connects wikipedia with a number of other sources such as MusicBrainz, Project Gutenburg, flickr […]

I found this paper a while ago through another blog I read a lot, Gizmodo. It talkx about how members of Facebook and MySpace are divided by their real-life social status. Facebook tends to cater more towards what author calls “good” kids. These are college-bound, preppy  teenagers. MySpace users are usually part of the lower class society, […]

The following information was explained by Kate Ehrlich of IBM Research during her talk to the Information Science department on February 22, 2008. Details are copyright IBM.
In engineering projects, communication is essential between people who are working on related tasks. Similar to this idea is the idea of triadic closure, which states that […]

Digg Labs Swarm is a visualization that displays the most popular/most frequently viewed news articles on digg.com and shows how readers connect from one article to the next. A screen shot of the website can be seen below:

The visualization relates to our discussion in class about triadic closure - a property that is satisfied when […]

In class, we learned about Google advertising algorithm that is mainly used in Google AdWords. AdWords is Google’s advertising product and its main source of revenue. Advertisers bid on the word(s) that will trigger their aids when a user searches that word(s) on Google’s search engine. Therefore, Google not only revolutionize how people create searches […]

The future of television is of course going to be digital and HD, but it is also going to be watched strictly from the computer screen or a television which now are interchangeable. Computer users have the ability to watch an episode of say “The Office” on a wide screen HDTV, stop it […]

      Brokers connect two parties which do not have ties between them. As we covered in lecture, brokers can enjoy one’s power when they have no competition. In real life, it is easy to find brokers in many cases, ranging from brokers involved in relatively trite issues to ones involved in international issues. In my […]